Europe in Motion
Europe's coastlines
Europe has more coast per square kilometre than any other continent, and almost none of it looks like the postcard. Atlantic, Mediterranean, Adriatic, Baltic, Aegean, Black Sea and Arctic.
The query Any destination tagged Coast & beaches. Run against all 319 destinations on every build, and nothing here is hand-picked — there is no field for naming a destination in a motion, deliberately. 150 match, in 30 countries; the 56 below are at most two per country.
All of them tagged Coast & beaches.
Gjirokastër
A UNESCO-listed Ottoman town of stone-roofed tower houses on a steep hillside under a castle.
Himarë & the Riviera
Ionian villages between mountain and sea, with beaches that were empty ten years ago and are filling fast.
Nessebar
A rocky peninsula joined by a causeway, with more medieval churches per square metre than anywhere on the Black Sea.
Plovdiv
One of Europe's oldest continuously inhabited cities, on six hills, with a Roman theatre still in use.
Dubrovnik
A maritime republic in near-perfect limestone, walled, car-free, and under real pressure from its own popularity.
Motovun
A walled hill town over a truffle forest, with a walkable rampart and a view of the whole Mirna valley.
Nicosia
A Venetian star-shaped fortress city with a UN buffer zone through the middle and a crossing on the main shopping street.
Paphos
A harbour town with Roman villa floors that are among the finest mosaics anywhere, and royal tombs cut into the rock.
Aarhus
A student city with a rainbow walkway on its art museum and a reconstructed old town beneath it.
Copenhagen
A harbour city clean enough to swim in the middle of, with the densest good eating in the Nordics.
Lahemaa
A national park of bog, forest, manor houses and abandoned Soviet submarine bases, an hour east of the capital.
Tallinn
A walled hanseatic town where the merchants' houses, the guild halls and the city wall all survived, and a startup district grew up beside them.
Porvoo
Red ochre warehouses on a river, and Finland's second-oldest town an hour from the capital.
Amboise & the Loire châteaux
A royal town on the Loire, with Leonardo's last house at the top of it and Chenonceau downstream.
Annecy
A canal town on the cleanest large lake in Europe, with the Alps standing straight up behind it.
Hamburg
A merchant republic and Europe's third port, with more bridges than Venice and Amsterdam together.
Lübeck
The queen of the Hanseatic League, on an island, in brick gothic, and the home of marzipan.
Athens
A sprawling modern capital with a 2,500-year-old temple on a rock in the middle and a food scene that got very good, quietly.
Chania, Crete
A Venetian harbour with an Ottoman quarter behind it, on an island large enough to be its own country.
Tihany, Lake Balaton
A lavender peninsula with an abbey on a cliff, sticking into a shallow warm lake.
Tokaj
The world's first classified wine region, from 1737, on volcanic slopes at a river confluence.
Höfn & Jökulsárlón
A langoustine port beside Europe's largest ice cap, where icebergs float out to sea past a car park.
Húsavík
A wooden church, a whale museum, and the most reliable whale watching in Europe.
Dingle
A fishing town on a peninsula of beehive huts, empty beaches and the westernmost point of Europe's mainland fringe.
Galway
A small port city that plays music every night of the week and treats a festival as its natural state.
Alghero, Sardinia
A Catalan-speaking walled port on Sardinia's northwest coast, with sea caves and Bronze Age towers inland.
Bellagio & Lake Como
A village on the point where the lake divides, with villa gardens on both arms and ferries between them.
Kuldīga
A wooden town on Europe's widest waterfall, which is only two metres high but 249 metres across.
Liepāja
A wind-blown port with a derelict tsarist naval town at its northern end and a rock music habit.
Nida, Curonian Spit
Wooden fishermen's houses under a moving dune, on a sand spit between lagoon and sea.
Šiauliai
An industrial town whose reason to visit stands in a field twelve kilometres north.
Mdina & Rabat
The old walled capital on a hill, with about 250 residents and no traffic — called the silent city for a reason.
Valletta
A planned fortress city of 1566, on a peninsula between two harbours, with Caravaggio's largest painting in its cathedral.
Monaco-Ville
The medieval quarter on the rock: palace, cathedral, and an oceanographic museum built into the cliff face.
Kotor
A walled Venetian town at the head of the bay, with fortifications climbing 260 metres up the cliff behind it.
Perast
One street, sixteen baroque palaces, two islands offshore, and no room for a car.
Texel
The largest Wadden island: dunes, sheep, seals and thirty kilometres of empty North Sea beach.
Bitola
A former consular city with a wide pedestrian avenue, and the Roman ruins of Heraclea on its edge.
Ohrid
A town of Byzantine churches on a cliff over one of the world's oldest lakes, with a Slavic literary tradition that began here.
Alta
Finnmark's largest town, with 6,000-year-old rock carvings and a cathedral shaped like the aurora.
Balestrand
A Sognefjord village of dragon-style timber villas, where 19th-century painters came and then stayed.
Białowieża
The last primeval lowland forest in Europe, with wild bison in it, on the Belarusian border.
Gdańsk
A Hanseatic port of narrow gabled houses, where the war began and Solidarity ended it.
Lagos & the Algarve
Golden cliffs, sea caves and the harbour that launched the age of exploration — and, less proudly, Europe's first slave market.
Lisbon
A tiled, hilly, sea-facing capital rebuilt on a grid after the 1755 earthquake, with trams that still climb the old parts.
Ljubljana
A capital of 300,000 with a car-free centre, a castle on the hill and Plečnik's architecture holding it together.
Piran
A Venetian town on a spit, with a salt pan beside it worked the same way since the 14th century.
Barcelona
A Roman city inside a medieval city inside a 19th-century grid, with Gaudí's work scattered across all three.
Bilbao
A steel city that commissioned one building in 1997 and changed what cities thought was possible.
Malmö
Post-industrial, young, and twenty minutes by train from Copenhagen across the bridge.
Ystad
Half-timbered market town on a long empty beach, with a Bronze Age stone ship on the cliff above.
Lugano
Palm trees, a glacial lake and Italian spoken everywhere, twenty minutes from the Alps.
Fethiye & the Lycian coast
Rock-cut tombs in the cliffs above a harbour, and a 540-kilometre coastal path starting nearby.
Selçuk & Ephesus
A market town beside one of the best-preserved classical cities in the Mediterranean.
Bath
A Roman bathing complex under a Georgian city built in one honey-coloured stone.
Belfast
A Victorian industrial city working through its own recent past in public, with murals as the text.
Journeys that go this way
Across Iberia and along the coast
Atlantic to the Mediterranean
Porto · Lisbon · Évora · Seville · Granada · Barcelona · Nice · Rome
Venice to Dubrovnik the long way round
The Adriatic Run
Venice · Ljubljana · Piran · Rovinj · Split · Mostar · Kotor · Dubrovnik
The medieval trading league, in order
The Hanseatic Arc
Bruges · Amsterdam · Lübeck · Gdańsk · Riga · Tallinn
Themes that run through it
Ships, settlements and the places they reached
Viking Europe
Roskilde · Þingvellir · Lofoten (Svolvær) · Oslo · Bayeux & the Landing Beaches · Dublin · York · Reykjavík
The empire, where it is still standing up
Roman Europe
Rome · Arles · Split · Selçuk & Ephesus · Bath · Plovdiv · Syracuse & Ortigia · Nicosia
Where the ferry timetable is the itinerary
Island Europe
Naxos · Vis · The Aran Islands (Inis Mór) · Texel · Islay · Victoria, Gozo · Nida, Curonian Spit · Lofoten (Svolvær)
Build this into a route
The Journey Planner weights the same tags this page queries on, so choosing Coast & beaches there will build a route through places like these. Plan a journey → · Discover mode →